Verkkokeskusteluareenat - deliberatiivista julkisuuttako?

Authors

• Veikko Pietilä

Abstract

The interactive characteristics of the internet have raised hopes that the Web will invigorate a public sphere now crippled by commodification and fragmentation. This positive development would be realized through deliberative political debates on the web sites dedicated to public discussion. For the optimists, cyberspace already constitutes a deliberative sphere whereas the pessimists point to the questionable quality of debates on the existing web sites. In this article I analyse the nature of the discussions on three Finnish web sites. I tackle specifically two questions: (1) what aspects of the public sphere do these discussion sites represent and (2) what kind of deliberation, if any, do the discussions on the sites display. The results reveal that the discussions come closer to strategic than to communicative action, that is, they display almost no characteristics of earnest deliberation. Moreover, the web sites seem to contribute to an interrelated public sphere only when the discussion is actively facilitated.